A SUNY-ESF student was a part of a team that recently won a showcase by helping improve the paper manufacturing process.

Last Saturday, there was a showcase held at the State University of New York Polytechnic Institute in Marcy, New York, for teams participating in the Commercialization Academy. Twenty-five students from 11 different universities participated, among them was Jake Clintsman from the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, whose team was one of the winners of the showcase. The team created a software that can predict the causes of degradation in manufacturing, which can save companies money.

The Commercialization Academy was founded by the Startup Strategy Group, which focuses on pairing students with technologies to commercialize those technologies. At the moment, they are running the Commercialization Academy in Rome, New York at the Air Force Research Lab. Student-teams are paired with air force technologies and work for three months learning everything about them.

Clintsman first heard about the Commercialization Academy when the founder, Mike McCoy, came to SUNY-ESF with an alumna from the college, Misty Blowers, to speak with Clintsman about the academy and form a team focused on the paper industry inside of manufacturing.

Clintsman was excited at the prospect of taking a patented technology and building a business of it. “Being a student of the paper and bio-process department at ESF, I liked what they were doing and I’ve always had an interest in doing something not-mainstream, not just going into the industry and working for the industry,” he said.

The specific technology that Clintsman and his team worked on was built for manufacturing purposes and stemmed from research conducted by Blowers who had been working for the Air Force. Blowers and a partner created a patent for an event detection apparatus to reduce false alarm rates, which is a software that predicts events that occur during an industrial process.

Specifically what the software does is look for paper breaks. If there is degradation inside of the process on the paper-line, the technology will be able to find the cause. Using gathered information, it can then predict what the causes of degradation are before they actually occur.

The largest benefit of this patent is that it saves the manufacturing industry downtime, which results in saving money. The patent reduces the downtime of a manufacturing line or of an entire mill by predicting when a break will happen, and the process is able to be corrected before a paper break occurs, Clintsman said.

Preparation for the showcase was intense, as Clintsman and the other students participating had three months to understand their technology and the markets they wanted to enter.

“It was a lot of fun,” said Clintsman. “The first week that we all got together was called crucible week, where we spent five days learning all the different technologies that were part of the commercialization academy and learning the different patents.”

Clintsman chose a team that consisted of members from other colleges.

“We developed a group bond, which was really great,” said Clintsman. “It became this whole community where we could bounce ideas off each other and really support each other in the process of trying to create a start-up company.”

Clintsman’s team was one of the winners of the showcase. Their goal was to get to the next step so that they could test on a live setting which is in line with one of the larger purposes of Startup Strategy to move intellectual property owned by the government into the private marketplace.

The next steps for Clintsman and his team are to negotiate a license from the Air Force Research Lab for the technology so that they can diversify into other industries, such as food and beverage, pharmaceuticals, oil and gas, after they validate it inside of the paper industry.

“We are in the process of forming a (Limited Liability Company) for our company, Kognitive Systems”, said Clintsman. “We’re working with the Commercialization Academy and our inventor, Dr. Misty Blowers, to really get this thing rolling.”

Published on December 2, 2014 at 12:01 am

Contact Anjali: acalwis@syr.edu